Crowd Control: Media executives are learning to read TV.

Media fragmentation is prompting some media executives to make
the most with less - less reach, that is, and diminished network
ratings that have come about as a result of an explosion of media
choices.

A team of analysts, market researchers, and statisticians at The
Media Edge (TME), Young & Rubicam's media buying and planning
powerhouse, has taken a page out of the current product
segmentation craze. They've designed a new tool that divides the
entire television line-up into programming clusters, each with its
own audience profile. TME's modeling tool, called TME Television
Tree or T3, pulls apart all sorts of income, viewership, and
demographic data from Nielsen Media Research to identify clusters
of television shows that most efficiently deliver a particular
target audience.

The TGIF/Family cluster, for example, which includes shows like
Sabrina, The Teenage Witch and 7th Heaven, is especially popular
with girls in their early and teen years, women aged 18 to 54, and
working women. Interestingly, this cluster also attracts viewership
from middle-aged men, according to TME. The News Shows and Police/
Law Dramas cluster has a middle-aged, higher-income audience and
scores particularly well with women between the ages of 35 and 54
and working women. Along with returning shows such as Dateline, and
Law & Order, this season's cluster includes newcomers like
Third Watch, Snoops, and Family Law.

The cluster system could come in handy when media buyers are
negotiating for prices during the upfront, or for make-goods
throughout the season, since the individual programs in each
cluster offer comparable market value to advertisers. T3 also
analyzes the composition of the "tagalong" viewers - those who may
not be part of a show's core demographic but can be potentially
desirable. Teen shows that fall into the TGIF/Family cluster, for
example, are also popular with tagalong moms viewing with their
kids, according to TME.

"This is our attempt to give buyers insight into the market
place," says Lyle Schwartz, a senior vice president and director of
media research at The Media Edge. "If you think of the media
negotiation game as poker, tools like this give us an extra
card."

The diagram of the T3 model looks like a family tree. Clusters
found on different branches of the tree are less similar than those
that are located along the same branch. At the top of the tree are
the younger-skewing show clusters, and at the bottom are clusters
made up of news magazine shows and other programming typically
watched by older audiences.

For the season that has just begun, TME has come up with 22 such
clusters, some of which are more obvious in their groupings than
others.

Not surprisingly, given this year's target-the-teen marketing
craze, the Adolescent Angst cluster has a slew of shows, such as
returning Dawson's Creek and Felicity, as well as new bets, such as
Roswell, Popular, and Jack and Jill. While popular with teenage
girls and women between the ages of 18 to 34, this cluster also
appears to attract a good portion of the harder-to-reach male
viewers aged 18-to-34, according to TME.

Then there is Saturday Morning Cartoons, made up of kid
favorites such as Mighty Ducks, Ninja Turtles, and Casper, which
scores extremely high with young boys and some young girls. In
fact, TME has identified no less than three such kiddie clusters:
Cartoons and Educational includes shows like Bugs Bunny, Science
Court, and Crayola Kids, and is a hit with young boys and girls and
African American households. And Action Toons (Batman & Robin,
Spider Man, Men in Black, Incredible Hulk) seems to be a magnet for
young boys and African American adults.

TME isn't the only media entity embracing the idea of achieving
maximum relevance by using segmentation strategies. Most major
agencies are in the process of fine-tuning these so-called
"optimizers" - modeling software that helps plan and buy media
efficiently.

"What used to be a mass market is all broken up in pieces," says
Jim Spaeth, president of the Advertising Research Foundation. "Now
there is a need to line up the pieces together in order to make the
communication work better."

Even some of the networks are jumping on the segmentation
bandwagon. In an effort to prove to media buyers the value of its
loyal core of older viewers, CBS has taken a step beyond demo
clustering and has factored in car-ownership patterns, using
Nielsen's National Television Index for November 1997. The aim of
the study, undertaken by David Poltrack, CBS's executive vice
president and director of research and planning, and Henry Assael,
a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business, was to
find which types of program clusters were likely to be viewed by
owners of ten different types of automobiles.

Among other findings, CBS's analysis claims that there is a
relationship between the demographics of car buyers and the
networks they watch: Compact-car owners tune in to Fox, for
example; larger- and luxury-car owners frequently tune in to CBS;
sports cars and sports utility vehicles owners watch NBC; and
compact-van owners like ABC. That kind of knowledge, Poltrack says,
is useful to media buyers because it suggests that programs can be
selected in groups for the purpose of targeting to specific product
categories, everything from video games and microwave ovens to
bottled water, soft drinks, and wine. Poltrack even suggests that
product ownership and usage is a more effective means of selecting
media than the traditional way, based on age and gender
demographics.

Poltrack has urged ad agencies to look at his analysis for their
ad campaigns. "If you utilize this approach, you get a cluster of
programs that delivers a usage and lifestyle pattern, and you can
work with that universe to learn more about these people." Poltrack
says this or a similar analysis method could be used by agencies to
test their campaigns in a more relevant way, by running focus
groups, say, of people who watch certain shows and own the type of
product being advertised. "This is the richest kind of media tool
you can have."